CLEVELAND — A smartphone screen can be a dreadful place. Sometimes when I tap open Twitter, I can almost feel my hair blowing back in the app’s blast of pure fury. So, on a recent visit to Cleveland, I found it a huge relief to scroll a few squares away to a modest new app designed for the residents of Northeast Ohio, where locals simply write down acts of kindness.

This is a world very unlike other social media; no one here is “owning” or “destroying” anybody. The news here is that people in one neighborhood kept their sidewalks shoveled in a snowstorm; that a high school kid in the city gave a young mother $20 for food and keeps a few dollars in his car as “giveaway money” for other needy folks; that someone’s wife brought home a new 8-week-old husky puppy; that the people of Northeast Ohio are standing with their Ukrainian neighbors in prayer. It creates a bit of a Love Actually effect — like that scene in the beginning of the movie in which Hugh Grant refers to the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport, which is full of people hugging and happy to see one another, and concludes that “love, actually, is all around.” I close the app thinking, hey, kindness is everywhere, even in These Divisive Times. Good for us.

Such warm fuzzies are brought to you by something called the Kindland initiative, an attempt, launched in 2020 by local nonprofit leader Stuart Muszynski to get the entire city of Cleveland to “just be kind.” Orange billboards have lately sprouted up along highways telling citizens here, “Together, We Are Kindland,” and people can use the “Just Be Kind” app to track everyday good deeds around town. The aim of the project — a reaction in part to the viciousness of American politics today — is nothing less than to “make Cleveland and its region the kindest place in the country.” The end game is loftier still: “to make kindness the overriding, embedded, and unifying national value in America,” and thereby help heal all manner of societal ills.

As a proving ground for such an ambitious concept, Cleveland — with one of the highest poverty rates of any big city in the country, where the homicide stats are among the worst they’ve been in three decades, where one man recently got shot in what police said was a confrontation over a flat tire, where American political toxicity is on full display in Ohio’s multimillion-dollar slugfest of a U.S. Senate race — has its work cut out for it. Even so, the early stats seem to show that Cleveland is indeed quite kind. Kindland leaders hoped to record 1 million acts of kindness by the end of 2021; they blasted way past that with 37 million. (Some of these, admittedly, were bulk kindnesses, such as 150,000 blood donations to Cleveland’s American Red Cross and some 780,000 families served by the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, but still.) Perhaps a better way to measure “Kindland” uptake among the general public is by the active users of the app, still a modest 898, according to Kindland organizers.

The hoped-for sum of these parts, as two Kindland leaders asserted in a column for Cleveland.com, is that kindness can be a “bridge between differences — racial, political, economic and social,” and a “gateway drug” to all kinds of other desirable social outcomes. Kind people wouldn’t commit any homicide, the thinking goes. Kind workers would boost economic performance. Kind politicians might forgo name-calling in favor of actual service delivery. Indeed, both Cleveland’s progressive young mayor, Justin Bibb, and one of Ohio’s leading conservative Senate candidates, Mike Gibbons, told me they are all-in on the Kindland concept, which each can plausibly claim for their political side: It’s liberal in its emphasis on communal good and conservative in its promotion of individual values. Among Kindland’s hundreds of nonprofit and corporate supporters are a big bank and a lefty church.

If any concept is tame and flexible enough not to fight over, kindness would seem to be it. Yet this seemingly anodyne feel-good project has gotten a surprising amount of pushback — for not doing enough. Cleveland Scene writer Sam Allard was an especially tough critic, torching the Kindland initiative on Twitter as a “stupid new civic moonshot” that at best can’t fix what really ails Cleveland and at worst is a reputation-laundering vehicle for problematic corporate partners. (One sponsor, FirstEnergy, last year agreed to pay a $230 million fine and admitted to bribing public officials in exchange for favorable legislation.) Allard is pro-kindness but pissed off: The policy interventions that could make a real difference in Clevelanders’ quality of life, he wrote in the Scene, often require “legislation or allocation of public dollars in conflict with the preferences of corporate interests and wealthy individuals, who for obvious reasons love elevating politically neutral priorities like ‘kindness.’” Shannon Okey, a Cleveland entrepreneur, told me via email: “We don’t need ‘kindness.’ We need better paying jobs, healthcare, childcare and equal schools that aren’t funded by property taxes.” She thinks “Kindland is pointless window dressing on a city who needs better windows altogether.”

This kind of response underscores just how difficult it is in today’s America to find any “unifying national value,” even a local one, even one as basic as the “do unto others” stuff we all hopefully learned in kindergarten. As the Kindland initiative heads into its third year with a new advertising push and programming in two major school districts, I went to Cleveland to see if a “kind” city might become a laboratory for national healing, at least to some degree. In neighborhoods rich and poor, in a bakery, in a bar, in a school, at the airport, at City Hall, I witnessed many acts of kindness. Some Clevelanders I spoke to still worried, in a municipal-level mirror of the Great Civility Debate, whether short-term feel-goodery actually distracts from the policy fights needed to secure long-term progress. In other cases, the very affliction Kindland was supposed to help heal — political polarization — seemed destined to preclude any kind of unity. Then again, even if it can’t solve America’s biggest problems or even Cleveland’s, could a little more kindness really hurt?

Muszynski had personal experience with the power of kindness. In the early 1990s, he was struck by a bout of chronic fatigue syndrome that left him in bed for more than a year, and through much of that time, he told himself he was a failure to his wife and family. A doctor finally suggested he send kind messages to himself instead, so Muszynski created his own psychological treatment regimen of putting positive pictures in his mind 40 to 50 times a day. It took nearly a year, but he credits this practice with his healing. He told me that when he felt well enough to open the Plain Dealer for the first time in a long time, he saw reports of kids killing kids in school. He turned to Susan, a clinical psychologist, and said: “I think God has a new mission for me.”

The two began developing programming to promote kindness in schools, and thus began Values-in-Action. Far from embracing bromides and shunning real problems, they ran straight at some of the toughest problems in Cleveland. “We had serious gang issues,” says Terrance Menefee, who at the time served as principal of John Adams High School in the city and worked with Muszynski on programming there. Menefee estimates that he lost 14 kids to gun violence in the five years he led the school, ending in 2020. “But as quote-unquote corny as the fundamentals” of kindness initiatives were, he says, “the kids, they grasp to it.” The school instituted birthday celebrations with sheet cake for students. They brought in grandparents to offer life lessons and community leaders to give high-fives in the hallways. They tried to combat bullying and validated demonstrations of good behavior with cards and prizes. Cleveland.com reported that, within three years, beginning in 2017, suspensions dropped 70 percent, graduation rates rose and gang violence pretty much stopped, though the school district would not provide specifics on how much of this was owed to Values-in-Action Foundation programming specifically.

The foundation has been doing this kind of thing in dozens of schools nationwide for more than 20 years, but Muszynski lately has started to worry about the world students are heading into — whether all this schoolhouse character-building can survive a toxic grownup America, and whether the grownups couldn’t use some character-building refreshers themselves. He knows and grieves Cleveland’s systemic problems, and sees kindness as a pathway out. He also knows the power of branding. This started his crusade to turn Cleveland into Kindland — complete with a splashy launch featuring Ohio native John Legend, who teamed up with his nephew Tay Da Prince for a music video called “Love One Another.” (Sample rap: “If you’re tired and you’re stressin’ / Let this be a lesson / Love is the answer to the question.”) Cleveland Scene aside, the initiative has generally gotten good press. News 5 Cleveland ran a spot featuring Muszynski in a “Just Be Kind” face mask dropping off a bottle of wine at a neighbor’s house just because. Muszynski introduced me to more than half a dozen community leaders who were gung-ho about Kindland.

Still, in a city that’s seen its share of rebranding campaigns (the Plain Dealer once promoted the slogan “New York’s the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a Plum” for some reason), the “Kindland” idea isn’t ubiquitous. I asked a handful of random Clevelanders and other Northeast Ohioans if they’d heard of it and got a few laughs and puzzled expressions, though some had seen the signs. But Values-in-Action spokesperson Amanda Guarnieri tells me that 2022 is the year of the big push for community engagement. In her eyes, the city’s Kindland rebrand is just getting underway.

Menefee had spent much of second and third periods overseeing a student-led demonstration about the power of kindness, including a poetry reading from a junior named Lauren who asked, with a sincerity that made me ache: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we learned not to be negative in such a negative world / And lifted each other up, every guy and every girl?” A faculty member slipped me a piece of candy after leading the kids in a call-and-response chorus of “I’m blessed” and “I’m worth it.” Many of those kids later signed their names to a kindness pledge on a big poster in the cafeteria, vowing to “stop hurtful teasing and encourage others to do the same,” and to “do my part to make my school a safe place by being kind to others.”

All this did look like a start. On the other hand, among the signatures scrawled on the Kindland pledge in the JFK cafeteria, someone had simply written, “B------.” As for the fate of kindness outside the school, Democrats and Republicans in the state Legislature were failing to come together on redistricting maps, and the state Supreme Court was accusing Republicans of attempted gerrymandering. (“Politicians will be the last to drink the Kool-Aid,” Muszynski told me.) On Valentine’s Day, a 17-year-old girl in Cleveland was shot; she died weeks later.

“I feel like we could very much use kindness,” Lauren Welch, a Cleveland marketing professional and advocate, told me. “I think the issue with something like Kindland [is] that it kind of trivializes very serious, systemic issues that I think Clevelanders are facing on a daily basis.”

To the extent that the Kindland initiative overpromises what kindness alone can do — Would a place called Kindland really, as some boosters claim, lower infant mortality and child poverty? Is lack of kindness really the key driver to focus on in crime reduction? — it’s hard to see the harm in trying. There’s research showing that kindness gives the kindness-doer a boost of well-being, and that just as selfishness is contagious so is kindness. Advertising the kindness already out there, as the “Just Be Kind” app aims to do, could, in theory, generate more. “‘But there is so much poverty, crime and selfishness!’ is not a reason why Kindland will fail,” Eric Neumann, a Stanford psychology Ph.D. candidate who studies cynicism about human nature, wrote to me in an email. “It is the reason it is needed.”

At the same time, part of what can make the “kindness” concept seem unifying is its subjectivity: We can all mean different things using the same word and think we’re agreeing. Is it kinder to (politely!) insist someone wear a mask indoors or to leave them alone? Is it kinder to advocate to end abortion or to expand access to it? If the answers are obvious to you, the opposite answers are just as obvious to someone else who considers themselves just as kind. One Twitter user offered up to the #Kindland hashtag the donation of some coats, as well as prayers for expectant mothers and unborn babies, and urged, “BE KIND CHOOSE LIFE.” Welch told me that “kind[ness] is in the eye of the beholder,” and that while she considers herself a kind person, “I’m not so kind to people who actively want to keep abortion or reproductive justice and access away from women. … I actually represent something that is against everything that they’re standing for.”

Politics, actually, is all around.

Meanwhile, though, politicians have been among Kindland’s most fervent backers. Bibb, Cleveland’s Democratic mayor — who knows unkindness, having been the subject of a PAC-funded, race-baiting mailer in which his skin appeared digitally darkened — told me he was immediately intrigued by the “Kindland” concept when Muszynski pitched it to him. He ran for mayor, he says, on the belief that Washington is broken and cities are on the front lines of restoring democracy: “Who cares if you’re a Democrat or a Republican when it comes to snow removal, when it comes to fixing potholes, when it comes to fighting crime? They just want you to get stuff done.” Kindness is part of that, he says: It means grounding policymaking in people’s lived experience, which requires empathy.

For GOP Senate candidate Gibbons, a wealthy investment banker currently embroiled in an internecine primary race, “the whole kindness thing is pretty simple.” He has supported Muszynski’s work for years; he calls the John Adams High School story “incredible.” “I always tell Stuart that this is the conservative man’s best charity,” Gibbons told me on a call from his campaign bus. “They teach values.” Sounding almost word-for-word like the progressive mayor of the previous paragraph, he went on: “The idea of being kind to somebody and being empathetic, putting yourself in their position … are all traits that, if we all had, the world would be a better place.” Reflecting on national-level partisanship, he says politicians need to manage disagreements with respect; he would have no problem holding the door for Nancy Pelosi. “I don’t think calling anybody a name ever accomplishes anything,” he says.

Gibbons is also funding ads calling some rivals “Washington wimps,” and “no different than Democrats, because they’re weak.” But hey, it’s a Senate race, and Gibbons is nowhere near the worst offender — although he did, a few weeks after our conversation, get into a near-physical confrontation with primary rival Josh Mandel, who got in Gibbons’ face in a debate exchange over whether Mandel knew anything about business (Gibbons: “You don’t know squat”) before a moderator separated the two. This wasn’t the first unkind debate interlude from Mandel, who also polls near the top of the GOP primary field and who, in a February debate, called a Democratic opponent, Morgan Harper, “like AOC, only dumber”; Harper refused to shake Mandel’s hand afterward. J.D. Vance, another Republican candidate, regularly says mean things in public, such as that that the country is effectively run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

So much for respectful disagreement. Muszynski’s hunch that ordinary people will need to bring the country together is probably correct, but it can also be seen as a sad commentary on many of the people who put themselves forth as leaders.

That’s the other thing about kindness, though: People fall short. This is perhaps especially true of ambitious politicians, but anyone who professes to be kind is going to let slip a mean word or deed from time to time. Occasional, even frequent, failure doesn’t make the ideal itself unworthy — it just makes it an ideal. My Cleveland visit did not fully reassure me that America is going to be OK. But it did reinforce the value of marginal progress. If there’s a slight chance a city, or even just several people in it, can move closer to a kind ideal, maybe even inspire the rest of us to treat one another a bit better, isn’t that worth a shot?